The Castle by Franz Kafka, 4

   From the mouthpiece came a humming, the likes of which K. had never heard on the telephone before. It was as though the humming of countless childlike voices—but it wasn’t humming either, it was singing, the singing of the most distant, of the most utterly distant, voices—as though a single, high-pitched yet strong voice had emerged out of this humming in some quite impossible way and now drummed against one’s ears as if demanding to penetrate more deeply into something other than one’s wretched hearing. K. listened without telephoning, with his left arm propped on the telephone stand he listened thus. 
   He had no idea how long, not until the landlord tugged at his coat, saying that a messenger had come for him. “Go,” shouted K., beside himself, perhaps into the telephone, for now someone answered. (20, emphasis added) 

Someone was able to answer the phone even if K. never dialed a number in the first place. What principle is operating here? Dream logic? The unconscious? Magical realism? Science fiction? Or is it simply a well calculated joke? From humming to singing, from children’s voices to distant singing, from listening to waiting, from static to a definite reply: there’s an apparent breach of the fundamental laws of nature here. Or is there only error in observable dimensions? A warping of spacetime, “in some quite impossible way”. But as suggested in one of the previous quoted passages, no errors ever occur; if one does occur, who can say that it is an error? 

The Castle is a palpable example of spontaneous realism, a tendency in writing characterized by shifts in narrative direction. The scene shifts may be dreamlike or not, they may be logical or not, and magical or not. Whatever the case, a spontaneous realist novel is a record of transformations: of characters, scenes, and details. The changes in the appearance and attitudes of characters may be gradual or sudden—without due warning, without being prefigured—and irrevocable.

Frieda’s disposition changes from a resolute lover to a wronged woman. Jeremias, one of the assistants, suddenly changes appearance from a youthful person to an old, infirm man “whose flesh sometimes gave one the impression that it wasn’t quite alive” (237). Some major changes are explained in flashback stories of the villagers, where a family’s economic standing suddenly plummets, their vigor turning into wretchedness, and their health deteriorating to a pitiable state. The witness to all these instabilities is tenacious K. whose search for work and recognition is rebuffed by the Count’s authorities.

*

 

“We are not your guardian angels and don’t have to follow you every single byway. Well, all right. The chairman thinks differently. Of course the actual decision, which is handled by the Count’s authorities, is not something he can speed up. But within his sphere of influence he seems to want to arrive at a truly generous temporary settlement, which you are free to accept or to reject, he is offering you temporarily the post of school janitor.” (90-91) 

To be more precise, K. was reprieved from unemployment and was now faced with underemployment. He was offered a temporary job as a school janitor. For someone trained in a technical job as a land surveyor, this was an absurd proposition. K. refused the offer. But consistent with the novel’s spontaneous absurdity, he was later made to accept the job. By the end of the book, the landlady fancied another job for him, a plausible job but utterly incompatible to his skills as surveyor. Given the serious comedy of what came before, the kind of job he was offered by the landlady adds laughter to injury.

*

For all the ridiculous tangles K. found himself in, his uncompleted journey to the Castle can be read as a heroic effort.

Certainly, I am ignorant, that at least is true, sadly enough for me, but the advantage here is that those who are ignorant take greater risks, and so I’ll gladly put up with my deficient knowledge and its undoubtedly serious consequences for a little while, for as long as my energy holds out. (55) 

The irony is that K.’s journey also represents a missed opportunity. At the moment when he stumbled on a Castle authority, someone who could assist him in his troubles, he was not able (the author will not let him) to seize the day. Kafka presented a possible way out for K. but he did not allow him to even consider it. At the precise moment when a light is proferred K., he collapsed in exhaustion. Whatever K. (a person, a cog in the wheel) does is answerable to the built system in place. He elected to go through the motions even if there’s a stronger and stronger indication that all his efforts are doomed.

Thus the novel is destined to be an open metaphor, concerned as it is with the collapse of meaning and representation. Its cathartic encounters and transformations tend to emphasize the tragic comedy of human existence. It is a deeply religious text in the hermeneutic sense as it takes as its object the naked individual in the face of societal (and authorial) manipulations, in the face of machinations by an inscrutable power structure. But as a secular text, the novel is more open to inquiry, more robust in its possibilities. For example, the Castle can be seen as a metaphor for metaphors, a projection of all of man's yearnings and desires.

How suicidal happiness can be! (269) 

A metaphor for happiness, if you will. Metaphors are worth pursuing. Interpreting then becomes an exercise of freedom, even if the same appears as elusive and illusory as a hulking structure enclosed in fog.

“It isn’t easy to understand exactly what she is saying, for one doesn’t know whether she is speaking ironically or seriously, it’s mostly serious, but sounds ironic.” “Stop interpreting everything!” said K. (205) 

You said it, K.



(Note: This is my last post on the novel. All quotes are from Mark Harman’s translation of The Castle (Schocken Books, 1998).)

The Castle by Franz Kafka, 3

In reality Hans was looking for K.'s help against his father, it was as if he had deceived himself, for he had thought that he wanted to help K. whereas what he had truly wanted, since nobody in their old circle could help them, was to determine whether this stranger, whose sudden appearance even Mother had noted, might perhaps be able to help them. (147)

Yet another interpretation of K's struggles around the Castle was messianism, the belief in a savior or redeemer. K. was ostracized by some Castle villagers and not given a chance to practice as a surveyor, but he was also embraced by others as someone who could be the answer to some of their problems. The Landlady, the Chairman, and the Teacher were the ones who wanted to drive him out. Hans, Barnabas, Frieda, and Olga, all seemed to need something from K.

With K.'s unannounced arrival, the deep rifts among the villagers and their back stories were brought back to the surface. He was seen as a kind of an answer to some of their problems. Consulting with K., the characters appeared to carry the burden of their existence. In the the same way K. wanted to establish himself in the village, they wanted something from him. While speaking to him, they were either solicitous and extremely cautious of the Castle's power over them, or they were prone to badmouthing and backstabbing others. They seemed to be emboldened by K.'s presence.

This K.-type messianism was exaggerated and used more overtly in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Unconsoled, wherein a pianist was assaulted by requests from different personages left and right prior to his performance.

 *

“Surveyor, in your thoughts you may be reproaching Sordini for not having been prompted by my claim to make inquiries about the matter in other departments. But that would have been wrong, and I want this man cleared of all blame in your thoughts. One of the operating principles of authorities is that the possibility of error is simply not taken into account. This principle is justified by the excellence of the entire organization and is also necessary if matters are to be discharged with the utmost rapidity. So Sordini couldn’t inquire in other departments, besides those departments wouldn’t have answered, since they would have noticed right away that he was investigating the possibility of an error.”

   “Chairman, allow me to interrupt you with a question,” said K., “didn’t you mention a control agency? As you describe it, the organization is such that the very thought that the control agency might fail to materialize is enough to make one ill.”

   “You’re very severe,” said the chairman, “but multiply your severity by a thousand and it will still be as nothing compared with the severity that the authorities show toward themselves. Only a total stranger could ask such a question. Are there control agencies? There are only control agencies. Of course they aren’t meant to find errors, in the vulgar sense of that term, since no errors occur, and even if an error does occur, as in your case, who can finally say that it is an error.” (64-65)

K. is the typical outsider. His arrival at the Castle has upset some kind of balance in the Castle's domain. He is like a brand new idea that is stubbornly rejected by tradition, someone who dared to ask questions and hence must be put in his proper place. His very presence is attributed to a clerical error. He is even reproached for being "a total stranger".

The Castle is necessarily an unattainable goal. Based on the characters' description of its inner workings, even if K. is granted audience by the Castle authorities, the layers of bureaucracy and red tape will not take him further afield. His journey or wandering is presented as Sisyphean. In that case, his desired destination (the Castle), as well as his starting point, does not matter; only his journey is important. This worldview is one shared by Javier Marías who said in an interview, "Conclusions and final explanations are often the most irrelevant—and disappointing—parts of a novel. What counts the most—and what we remember the most—is the atmosphere, the style, the path, the journey, and the world in which we have immersed ourselves ... What matters, then, is the journey along the horizon—in other words, the journey that never ends." Another modernist novelist, João Guimarães Rosa, put it another way: The truth is not in the setting out nor in the arriving: it comes to us in the middle of the journey. The novel being an unfinished novel already implies that Kafka didn't care in the least how the story proceeds. He has already written the meat of his vision through K.'s eternal struggle to settle down in the village despite being prevented from doing so.



(Note: This post is benefited by an online discussion of the novel.)

The Castle by Franz Kafka, 2

He speaks to Klamm, but is it Klamm? Isn’t it rather someone who merely resembles Klamm? Perhaps at the very most a secretary who is a little like Klamm and goes to great lengths to be even more like him and tries to seem important by affecting Klamm’s drowsy, dreamlike manner. That part of his being is easiest to imitate, many try to do so; as for the rest of his being, though, they wisely steer clear of it. And a man such as Klamm, who is so often the object of yearning and yet so rarely attained, easily takes on a variety of shapes in the imagination of people. For instance, Klamm has a village secretary here called Momus. Really? You know him? He too keeps to himself but I have seen him a couple of times. A powerful young gentleman, isn’t he? And so he probably doesn’t look at all like Klamm? And yet you can find people in the village who would swear that Momus is Klamm and none other than he. That’s how people create confusion for themselves. And why should it be any different at the Castle? (181)

The deliberate objective of the people around K. seems to be to confuse him, to speak to him in circuitous circumlocutions. Why shouldn't it be any different from what the Castle stands for? Why shouldn't the entire novel be a novel about duplicity, misunderstanding, miscommunication, and fraud? What's interesting is that K. himself seems to be aware that he is being had from the beginning. He's playing the game even if he's acting naïve about it the whole time: "It amuses me ... only because it gives me some insight into the ridiculous tangle that may under certain circumstances determine a person's life. (63)"

Of course to think of The Castle as the odyssey of the unemployed is also a simplistic reading. The scenes are just too rich with meanings and innuendos. Nothing is as it seems. The man called Klamm may not be Klamm at all. The surface appearance of things is deceitful. Anything unexpected can happen and it does happen. Time collapses. And snow, bad weather, will fall on a beautiful day.

“How much longer is it till spring?” asked K. “Till spring?” repeated Pepi, “the winter here is long, a very long winter, and monotonous. But we don’t complain about that down there, we’re safe from the winter. Of course at some point spring does come and summer too, and they certainly have their day, but in one’s memory spring and summer seem so short, as if they didn’t last much longer than the two days, and sometimes even on these days, throughout the most beautiful day, snow falls.” (311-312)

The Castle by Franz Kafka

   The Castle, whose contours were already beginning to dissolve, lay still as ever, K. had never seen the slightest sign of life up there, perhaps it wasn't even possible to distinguish anything from this distance, and yet his eyes demanded it and refused to tolerate the stillness. When K. looked at the Castle, it was at times as if he were watching someone who sat there calmly, gazing into space, not lost in thought and therefore cut off from everything, but free and untroubled; as if he were alone, unobserved; and yet it could not have escaped him that someone was observing him, but this didn't disturb his composure and indeed—one could not tell whether through cause or effect—the observer's gaze could not remain fixed there, and slid off. Today this impression was further reinforced by the early darkness, the longer he looked, the less he could make out, and the deeper everything sank into the twilight. (98-99)

The obvious mystery of Franz Kafka's unfinished novel was whether the Castle is a symbol for something and whether the novel is a kind of allegory. Many interpretations were put forward. Max Brod and the Muirs, according to Mark Harman (the translator in my edition), favored a theological/religious/spiritual interpretation of the Castle as a source of "salvation" or "divine grace" that K. desperately seeks. Harman tended to dismiss or at least downplay this interpretation, calling it "simplistic." I tended to agree with him. A theological interpretation can only get you so far. I think that an atheistic interpretation of the Castle can say more about the whimsical and inconsistent attitudes of the characters, the unpredictable plot, and the dense "bureaucratic" prose stye.

If anything, the Castle, perched high up on a hill, at least represents the seat of political power. At the basic level, K. wanted to practice his profession of surveying and earn his worth. But people get in the way of his desire to work. The "system" wouldn't let him be a productive individual. The Castle is basically a story about unemployment. But the prose of Kafka, which is closely tied to his politics, and which is also his poetics, obscures a lot through monolithic boredom. In the process, it gains excessive meaning through various interpretations and readings.

Girl with Curious Hair

There is no dearth of people who have read David Foster Wallace or DFW. His works have been looked and re-looked and re-re-looked into several times over for clues to understanding modern/post-modern lives. His iconic work Infinite Jest has appeared in at least 50 of the articles I have read since I subscribed to some literary magazines in my Google reader feed.

The reason I still did not pick up DFW after so much fuss over him was a certain hesitation I have towards American literature. From earlier writers to contemporary ones, I have hardly enjoyed an American author other than Steinbeck. The American books seem too dense, intentionally obscure and always spreading to 500 plus pages. It is almost as if the authors don't want people to read their words.

And Infinte Jest is certainly not inviting with its 1000 plus pages - it seemed to fall right into the category which I have come to identify with American literature. So I thought, let me ease into Wallace with a short story collection (a trick I tried with Joyce and it worked for me) - who knows may be I might end up liking him.

A few stories down in Girl with curious Hair, and my feelings have positively tilted in favor of DFW. And yet, there is some hesitation that remains. Some of the stories are brilliant. Take Here and There for example. A guy and girl narrate the story of their relationship (which is now over) simultaneously, going over the same summer and the same incidents. Eerily, it was almost as if it were two different stories - each of them seem wrapped up in their own worlds, disconnected from each other, living only with a perception of each other. The end summarizes it succinctly. The boy, an expert is theoretical electronics, falls to pieces while looking at a real circuit. A rather too obvious metaphor, perhaps. Yet, it uncannily describes that distance I feel with reality sometimes. Everything ends up as a concept inside the head, and while I conceptually know how to behave with a person, when to apologize, in reality things almost never go that way. Alienation, and the anxiety emanating from it could not be put more simply.

The other two engaging stories from the collection are - Little expressionless Animals and My Appearance. Both of them are doused in the world of television. Strictly speaking, the stories are perhaps a little out of date today, when television has already lost its ground to internet for devouring people's time and energy. But then, you only have to replace Jeopardy with Tumblr and Lettermen's show with Twitter, and the theme of the stories will become relavant to personal lives. There is a conversation in 'Little Expressionless Animals", where characters attempt to offer explanations about their lives to an imaginary TV audience. All of 'my Appearance' is about building and living a fake life, which is sensible and consistent. In both places, an artificiality, a simplification/justification arises because of the over-powering presence of media, because through it, you are now open to the world. (This also forces you to look into your own lives, analyze them more critically, do more, be more so that you could look better from that window, so in a way DFW is also celebrating media).

But then there are other stories which scare me - the title story for instance. Even though short, I found it tedious. It is about the punk life of a democrat and it appears to be written to shock. There is alienation of a kind in this story, a psycho-analysis and duplicity of life, but overall, it seems undeserving of being the title. Yet, DFW chose this as the title. It is this quirkiness that scares me from picking IJ - what if there is a lot of this quirkiness splashed over 1000 pages.

Nevertheless, his penchant for creating complex characters and have them come face to face with real ones is brilliant. And unlike the other Americans, his writing is clear, and written to be read.

Flash Notes on John Berger's Ways of Seeing

Ways of seeing, a popular college text now, is perhaps one of the all time must read small books ( less than 200 pages). I revisited  it for a reference and ended up rereading the whole thing again . As fascinating as it is pioneering ( considering it was written in 1972, way back in capitalism's childhood, well before the capitalism grew up and cast it's powerful grip around the idea of human life).

Berger and co. essentially chart the history of visual imagery in art, from the era of oil painting to television, slowly peeling off layer after layer, teasing out the implicit messages and societal subtexts hidden within the images, and quite remarkably without preaching a communist manifesto in the process! There are 7 essays in total - four with words and images, and three just images. Berger and team take you through how art has been influenced by many variables in the society, from wealth and class to religion and sexuality; how their interplay produced art as we know it (the oil paintings, nudes and portraits of colonial Europe, in the middle ages) as well as how, now, we are compelled to consume it (capitalism - here Berger understandably moves into photography, Design and Advertising)

Berger is still alive and kicking, I remember he wrote a recent article for n+1 or Guernica recently. I would be really curious to know his views on modern-age consumerism as a culture. It would be just wonderful if he takes time out to write a sequel the Ways of Seeing- possibly  commenting on the new era capitalism - from designer handbags, high definition televisions to Tumblr reblogs and FB like buttons. Perhaps not on the idea of compulsive consumerism as such ( which has been already covered here)  but more on the consumers themselves as a cultural cohort.  The need for the consumerism and perhaps suggestions about alternatives?

If you haven't read The Ways of Seeing, you must -  pronto. If you can't  get hold of the book, you can find the parent BBC series on youtube. Here's a quick link,  I haven't checked all those uploads on youtube, so not sure if all of the episodes are available.

Paris Trance, Geoff Dyer

The book jacket identifies the Paris Trance as a romance. I suppose to a large extent it is indeed a romance. Geoff Dyer, who I am getting to scorningly, grudglingly admire ( more for the life he’s lead than his writing, which by no measure is any less admirable) is a writer of themes and images.

The stories of the two couples, on their own and together is developed well. The unique, perhaps even daring aspect of the book is the dedication to idleness. I’ve never come across a book where the characters mooch around as much as they do here. It’s almost as if the book itself had smoked a joint and entered a trance.

Dyer has indeed admitted that one of the two main purposes of the book was to capture this aimlessness (the aimlessness of the 20s to be specific , the other purpose - to capture the drifting away). Dyer does capture it well in wry, informed Dyereseque prose ; a typical Dyer sentence would essentially twist on its tail contradicting its meaning yet conveying a perfect sentiment. And it is for this self flagellating funplay, that one reads Dyer.  But as the book progresses the images and the themes that Dyer specializes in turn monotonous and well, excessive. Somewhere midway through the book I became slightly nonplussed and at pages even lost interest.

+++

Dyer is a core romantic in denial. All his works or rather the books that I've read so far are elaborate sublimation to wrap the romance in a deliberate, middle aged sort of wisdom, even cynicism. But at its heart they are all young wild at heart romances.

Agreed that Paris Trance is a romance and agreed it is Paris, but how often do you meet a woman studying Nietzsche in Paris who also fancies walking past the idle men playing street football everyday at lunch time?  She must be almost unrealistic right? This is where I find Dyer faltering in his fictions, in his conception of his fictions rather (he’s admitted he’s poor at plots).

Most of his characters save for the protagonist ( who are invariably versions of himself) lack the richness of what I would call ‘an original fiction writer’, say Zadie Smith. Often most of his women characters become versions of themselves. I couldn’t tell the difference between Nicole in Paris Trance  and Laura in Jeff in Venice… Dyer seems to fail to look beyond a set template that he seems to have for his women – they are always intelligent, funny, articulate, somewhat attracted to marginalised men, and they are invariably, good at quips!

For these reasons we don’t really know much about Nicole in the book. I mean her own internal mind, her perspective. For the most of the book she is invariably looked at from outside, while pages and chapters go on about Luke. In the story both Luke and Nicole seem equally purposeless and lacking any direction, which is what makes them a great couple, well couple in a first place.  But something’s got to give right? Of the two, Nicole seems more mainstream and integrated. She comes close to questioning Luke about his life once  - What does he want to do? gets a typical I'm living my happiness answer and drifts back into the trance again! I felt slightly disappointed that somehow Dyer leans towards Luke than Nicole, almost overlooking her if not ignoring. I would have loved if Nicole actually broke up with Luke than the other way around. She had reasons to, yet it seemed that Dyer was too preoccupied with Luke which left the ending, in my opinion, one-sided and somewhat confused. I am aware that Dyer was trying to portray the absurdity and the confusion of the breaking up, but again it can’t be absurd without it making no sense to both the parties involved. As far as I know, the separation made perfect sense to Luke and Nicole just went with it. It's symbolized in their parting scene where Luke makes Nicole walk away from him while he watches her leave, as though living a Noir scene of a movie he had memorized in Pariscope. She willfully complies!

Must say was slightly relieved to finish it. And quite aptly finished in travelling in Turkey in the meander river basin, the river that gave us the word meandering just what the book did in its latter half. 

As a plot and characterizations quite thin actually, not one of Dyer’s best, and slightly stretched, otherwise a good read, the usual Dyer positives apply, enjoyable in most parts. I loved some of the Parisian images the book evoked, Dyer's view of Englishness and the coffeeshop flags conversation. Even Dyer can’t convince me that the said conversation didn’t really happened in his life.

The Temple of Dawn: Mishima

From time to time, I like to come back to Japanese writing, mostly to float in its ethereal world as against walking the more defined (and often harsh) ground of European writing. Besides, there are times in life when Memento Mori needs to be refreshed , and to do this, Mishima's words are a good place to go to.
The Temple of Dawn is the third part of the Sea of Fertility tetralogy written by Mishima. It is well-known that he committed ritual suicide the day he finished the last book : The Decay of Angel, and hence the set of books are tinged with the after-effect of this event. The awareness of death seems all the more palpable because we know what is to follow, and hence the words appear to carry a prophetic & self-appraising weight.
I have not followed the tetralogy in sequence (I seldom follow order in books), I first read Spring Snow, part one, and have now skipped the second Runaway Horses to make way for the third. At the heart of the books is one person, fated to die young again and again, in different reincarnations. These reincarnations are witnessed by Honda, who sees the same soul in four different forms, and attempts to save each of them from these early deaths.
The Temple of Dawn is named after a celebrated temple Wat Arun (literally meaning Temple of Dawn) in Bangkok. It is in Bangkok that Honda meets the second reincarnation of his friend Kiyoaki, who is now born as a Thai Princess. The princess remembers her past lives, as she remembers knowing Honda in both these lives. It is a fantastic story, and could be written only by an Oriental. The Occidental will find it hard to transgress the boundary of births, or even suggest multiple lives.
From Thailand, Honda goes on a trip to India - he wants to visit Benares & Ajanta there, towns from a very distant past. On the way, he spends some time in Kolkata during Puja where the violent religiousness of the city intimidates him. His descriptions of that madness is evocative. This madness seems to be the theme of his entire Indian sojourn, as he meets a country which is physical, crowded, anarchical and turns him into an insomniac. He dearly misses his country and its peace, acutely feeling the Japanese discomfort of things foreign. The parts on India read like a perceptive travelogue - something a more religious/spiritual Chatwin could have written. I would like to return to these pages when I am finished with the book.

The part where I am now, is almost a second book in itself. As a war is going on from which he is dissociated due to his age, Honda finds time for extensive reading. He reads and reflects on various theories in Buddhism - on reincarnation particularly, and on the differences between Theravada Buddhism & Mahayana Buddhism on the subject. Needless to say, my pace has considerably slowed down in these pages because they are quite rich and dense.

Underground

Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche by Haruki Murakami
Translated from the Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum and Philip Gabriel

I wanted, if at all possible, to get away from any formula; to recognize that each person on the subway that morning had a face, a life, a family, hopes and fears, contradictions and dilemmas—and that all these factors had a place in the drama. [7]

The drama took place on March 20, 1995. Five men, members of the Aum cult, released sarin poison gas in the Tokyo subway, killed a dozen people, and injured hundreds. Underground followed the template of Murakami's fiction: the story of ordinary men and women thrust in an abnormal situation. The difference was that it was a nightmare unfolding, as if in real time, in the real world. He did what Gabriel García Márquez accomplished in Clandestine in Chile—compress hours of interview into a compelling narrative.

The narrative was divided into short sections, focusing on a single human being and his part in the gas attack. The first part, also titled "Underground", was translated by Alfred Birnbaum. It recounted the event from the victims' point of view. To balance the story, the second part, "The Place That Was Promised", translated by Philip Gabriel, told of the stories of Aum cult members. I've yet to read the second part, but the first part was already a brilliant exploration of the outcome of terrorism.

In the first part, Murakami allowed the victims to tell the story on their own. They shared their personal backgrounds, where they came from and where they were born, their current work, the itinerary of their train rides, and what happened to them in the subway when they were exposed to sarin. For many of the victims, the attack had taken a toll on their lives. It had adversely affected their physical and mental constitutions. They are still burdened by the aftereffects of the sarin gas months after inhaling it.

The individual stories fitted snugly into Murakami's journalistic framework of conveying a macroscopic view of the nightmare. The story of the attack may have been predetermined; the outcome was all over the news. Here it was told without fanfare, and yet there are many instances in the book where I had goosebumps. Whereas some of Murakami's fiction was permeated with elements of science fiction and magic, the true story here stuck to the "truth". Ultimately, the truth is no less surreal, just like any surreal event that happens in life.

In its form and structure, Underground was reminiscent of Akutagawa Ryunosuke's story "In a Grove". Several witness are asked in a kind of deposition to recount what really happened on that day. The accumulation of the stories portrayed a kind of hell, of a nightmare experienced in broad daylight, underground.

Murakami was too entrenched in his subject to completely efface himself from the narrative. His strong opinions were shared in the prefaces of the two parts, in the introductory sections prefacing each victim's testimony, and in his summary essays at the end. In contrast to the oblique way with which he confronted the catastrophe of the Kobe earthquake in after the quake and the unconvincing war scenes in Kafka on the Shore, this work of nonfiction probed the direct infliction of cruelty, a direct confrontation with madness.

Perhaps Murakami's accomplishment here was to communicate what it really felt like to be in the middle of a tragedy. This he did with a generous amount of sympathy for the victims. In section after section, he interviewed a new face, someone with a new injury, a new perspective at what really transpired. It was a catalogue of grievances. The victims were repeating the terrorist act for the reader, over and over and over, as if drilling the same nail in the same hole.

What is the point of replaying the tragedy? What is the point of repeating for the reader the same thing in different ways? All these individual stories, what do they say? Do they add up to something coherent or graspable?

One is struck by a variety of responses to the attack: anguish, complacency, bitterness, fear, trauma. Seen from many angles, the gas attack approached a certain magnitude of reality for the reader, just as it must have had for the novelist who had to talk and listen to the victims, shaping and re-shaping the narrative in his mind.

It did not feel gratuitous or redundant to me. In the act of reading, it was as if the potent smell of the sarin gas was coming into life. The stories relived the individual responses, reactions, and sufferings; yet the collective stories were pointing to something more arresting. We are not learning something from one tragedy, one nightmare, or one moment of hell. We are reading about many tragedies, many nightmares, and many hells.

Murakami allowed the victims to assert their humanities in a world of "overwhelming violence" (his description of catastrophes in Japan, which included the 1995 Kobe earthquake and may as well include the recent earthquake and tsunami event in March and the resulting nuclear accidents). It is an uncertain world where one moment you're walking and standing free, and the next moment you are tipping over the train platform, the world literally darkening in front of you.

This is probably the finest book by Haruki Murakami that I've read. The ten works of fiction I've sampled had their brilliant moments, but they were a mixed bunch. One had the feeling that he was born to tell this story of terrorism.

Reading Dyer and Batuman ....

I am flitting between two totally different writers, who, if not overtly, by measure of the emotions evoked are very similar; I don’t know if it’s just me but reading the sober, whimsy tongue-in-cheek Geoff Dyer ( Yoga for people who can’t be bothered to do it..) alternately with the energetic, airy, delightful Elif Batuman ( The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them) is a party of epic proportions.

In cinematic terms it’s like watching alternating shots by Wes Anderson and Terrence Malick add up into a perfect narrative montage. Yoga for people who can’t be bothered to do it… is about Dyer’s travel-pieces ( that’s the best word I could come up for the chapters of  his book) and The Possessed is a chronicle of Batuman’s experiences of studying Russian Literature and all sorts of people she meets in the process; While Elif sends you on silents spasms of chuckles, Geoff makes you hold them, turn them into a reverie and float in them for a while relating your own travel experiences to his before you let it all go in an audible sigh or even an utter, that startles cab drivers! I am alternating the essays from the books and it’s just wonderful. If you are not too caught up see if you can try the combination, you will surely not regret it.

Here's a shot of the index of Yoga for people.....what Kindle can't offer :)

More soon 

Third Class in Indian Railways

Gandhi was forty five when he returned to India - the land he had left as a teenager, the land that was now completely alien to him.  As the hero of the South Africa he was extended several invitations by the Congress to join the nascent ‘national freedom struggle’. He politely refused them; instead he chose to travel. He travelled extensively throughout the subcontinent, mostly on trains. The main purpose of such a venture, as he had said himself was ‘to get a grasp of the life’ in India.

During these jaunts, it is believed he made very elaborate entries on his ‘first’ impressions of India. When I picked up this book (free ebook lying in some corner of  the net) I was hoping to find his journal entries during these travels. But as it turned out this book was a compilation of six essays/ media articles/ speeches between 1915 – 1918, after the major chunk of his travels were done.

Enriched by his travels, and the success at Champaran, he started giving shape to his ideas - on a social, cultural and a political level.  These essays were his initial arguments, where he is still somewhat ambivalent, where he still comes across considering their pros and cons than being conclusive about them.  These ideas would later gather momentum, evolve much more powerfully to eventually enter the national consciousness as the core 'Gandhian' values.

The first essay is actually about the travel in third class in Indian trains. He describes the hopeless conditions of the third class in Indian Railways and as always with Gandhi, makes a case for their improvement.  These passages are perhaps one of the earliest documentation of reverse culture shock by an Indian. Consider this one, and imagine the comment section if the following passage for published in an Indian web portal:

Not during the whole of the journey was the compartment once swept or cleaned. The result was that every time you walked on the floor or rather cut your way through the passengers seated on the floor, you waded through dirt.

The closet was also not cleaned during the journey and there was no water in the water tank.

Refreshments sold to the passengers were dirty-looking, handed by dirtier hands, coming out of filthy receptacles and weighed in equally unattractive scales. These were previously sampled by millions of flies. I asked some of the passengers who went in for these dainties to give their opinion. Many of them used choice expressions as to the quality but were satisfied to state that they were helpless in the matter; they had to take things as they came.

Subsequent essays are values one usually associates with Gandhi. Ideas like  'vernaculars' and 'The Moral Basis of Co-operation' are just of historical relevance now. Few others, like the chapter on 'Ahimsa' are perhaps still valid? The one titled 'Swadeshi' is penetrative where he espouses how religion and politics in India are inseparable. ( which is true, contrary to liberal opinion even to this day). Gandhi’s arguments are times warped, at times too vague but it does reflect something unique for that time – one man observing the world, preparing a ground report, and suggesting solutions.

The writing is typically colonial replete with waxing and waning of humility and excessive consideration. Personally, as far as the ideas are concerned, nothing written was new to me; I was looking to find a personal voice, something more direct that would reflect on the writer himself. But Gandhi writes in a very impersonal tone. Even in the article 'National Dress' where he defends against personal attacks  (Irwin who had criticized Gandhi for choice of desi clothes against European attire) he remains rather circumspect.

What the book reaffirms to me is what Naipaul had written long back about Gandhi –

No one, no one had understood India like Gandhi had.

As an aside here’s Gandhi writing about Banks and credit system in 1917. See if it rings any bells?

The credit which is becoming the money power of the world has little moral basis and is not a synonym for Trust or Faith, which are purely moral qualities. After twenty years' experience of hundreds of men, who had dealings with banks in South Africa, the opinion I had so often heard expressed has become firmly rooted in me, that the greater the rascal the greater the credit he enjoys with his banks. The banks do not pry into his moral character: they are satisfied that he meets his overdrafts and promissory notes punctually. The credit system has encircled this beautiful globe of ours like a serpent's coil, and if we do not mind, it bids fair to crush us out of breath. I have witnessed the ruin of many a home through the system, and it has made no difference whether the credit was labelled cooperative or otherwise. The deadly coil has made possible the devastating spectacle in Europe, which we are helplessly looking on.

The entire book, first published in an Indian Lahore, is now available for free online. Suggested for light reading may be as a break in between heavy books. Obviously for readers interested in  Pre-independent India and Gandhi.

Among other things, this is my first book read on Kindle.

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi...

Apologies for the absence dear readers, but I come with the promise of many reviews. Here's the first one : 

I became more interested in Geoff Dyer after I read Lavanya's post here. But other affairs, Galgut and travel kept me occupied. Dyer is not as popular a writer to walk into a bookstore and stumble between Emma Donaghue and Dave Eggers, so I was pleasantly surprised when I found Dyer's Jeff in Venice and Death in Varanasi at Landmark in Bangalore, India.   Took it along to Rajasthan where I travelled, and eventually, between other worries, twittering and work finished it a good month after I had bought it.

This is my first Dyer and I liked it. That, in itself,  would make it unlikable for an average reader.

The book is really two separate novellas: the first is the story of Jeff Atman, an aimless middle rung journalist in London who is assigned to cover the Venice Binneale to a ‘scoop’ interview around a story of prized nude photograph of a singer?

The action moves to very ‘otter’ than ever before Venice. Jeff, portrayed as somewhat of an outsider at the international art scene, trudges along the parties and galleries gulping Bellinis and snorting Cocaine. He meets Laura an American gallery owner (or was she a curator?)  Anyway, they hit off. They roam around piazzos and gallerias cracking airy drunken jokes and witty repartees at each other. They duly end up doing what two people who hit off are expected to do – have roaring sex! The segment is well written – cynical but dipped in comical smugness, an unmistakable sense of lurking gaiety pervades through the pages as Jeff looks down upon the clichés and the quirks of art world between his broad range of experiences in Venice - absolute aimlessness ( keenly observing a pigeon on a pavement or snorting cocaine in a cathedral) to kinky sex and snogging in public toilets. He even manages to get stoned with his celebrity interviewee.  I loved the sense of humour that Dyer smuggles into this segment - not overt yet well ingrained within the dialogues. There are quite a bit of puns too. (Dyer – hair dye etc) 

The second part is the story of an unnamed protagonist (May be Dyer / may be Jeff, it is never revealed ) who gets assigned ( ? again)  at the last minute as a substitute to write an article about Varanasi the historical-holy city of the Hindus.

He starts off at a typical arm's distance – mildly disdainful of the poor hygiene and the mad Indian traffic, but slowly gets drawn into the Hindu idea of the life and universe.  He overstays well past his assignment, gets initially attracted to a fellow Brit and later a Swiss traveler but not as much as to the city itself which continually entices him like a long lost lover, unraveling through its strange inhabitants and mysterious ways that appear, at once, both profound and meaningless to him. Under such contradictions he grows more interested in mulling over his existence and life in general; he becomes more distant from his wants and lacks, finally he is shown to develop abstract spiritual ideas of his own. 


The second segment, needless to say, is more engaging  - the Dyer potshots are more subtle though at times gross and unnecessary ( talking goat - a chide at Rushdie and other magical realists). The description of the scape is more detailed, which lingers away as the book progresses. The change to within is well captured, as the protagonist turns more reflective and zany by the page. 

At times the book was predictable, at parts needed tighter writing, but generally I liked it. It's in my favourite genre too: part memoir, part travelogue, and part philosophy without any plot whatsoever. Readers looking for plots are suggested to make an easier choice.  I loved both the novellas, each I could easily relate to: hedonistic frivolity of the west to the silent fatalism of the east. The book draws its title from the old Thomas Mann classic – Death in Venice - a novel that also deals with the same themes of life and death but with somewhat greater intensity. 

This is a love it or hate it sort of a book. I get a feeling that goes for Dyer as a writer too. Once you finished the book it’s not hard to see why Dyer chose to weave in the two cities as a part of a book. In essence, the book is about the these two cities, their similarities and contradictions. Both are very distinct cities – literally poles apart yet very similar. Varanasi being symbol of the abstractness of Hindu philosophy while Venice an international art hub of sorts.  Both attract travellers but for totally different reasons. 


Venice isn’t as detailed as Varanasi in the book, but I still suppose, it’s fair to say that the book is a charming tribute to both the cities, a sort of testimonial that makes you run to them the very next holiday. I haven’t been to Varanasi but I already feel I know a lot about it. I’ve even been googling hotel Ganges View.


Now onto other Dyers.

A reader's manual of painting and calligraphy

I shall go on painting the second picture but I know it will never be finished. I have tried without success and there is no clearer proof of my failure and frustration than this sheet of paper on which I am starting to write. Sooner or later I shall move from the first picture to the second and then turn to my writing, or I shall skip the intermediate stage or stop in the middle of a word to apply another brushstroke to the portrait commissioned by S. or to that other portrait alongside it which S. will never see. When that day comes I shall know no more than I know today (namely, that both pictures are worthless). But I shall be able to decide whether I was right to allow myself to be tempted by a form of expression which is not mine, although this same temptation may mean in the end that the form of expression I have been using as carefully as if I were following the fixed rules of some manual was not mine either. For the moment I prefer not to think about what I shall do if this writing comes to nothing, if, from now on, my white canvases and blank sheets of paper become a world orbiting thousands of light-years away where I shall not be able to leave the slightest trace. If, in a word, it were dishonest to pick up a brush or pen or if, once more in a word (the first time I did not succeed), I must deny myself the right to communicate or express myself, because I shall have tried and failed and there will be no further opportunities. (p. 3, tr. Giovanni Pontiero)

The start of José Saramago's Manual of Painting and Calligraphy is unmistakable in its trademark tone. The lulls and pauses in the phrasing are searching for a way forward. The prose is laden with qualifications, trying to overcome the clauses that skirt away from the general idea. The ideas are spreading like ripples in the pond, while above hovers a unique voice, a singular mind, a ruthless thought process. The only comparison I can instantly think of is the masterful opening of a Javier Marías.

Manual of Painting and Calligraphy is a work of fiction, a novel, but it is an essay in the same way that Blindness and Seeing are essays on blindness and lucidity. It is narrated by H., a fifty-year old painter commissioned by S. for a portrait. The first few pages unfold slowly, telling of H.'s difficulties in producing two simultaneous portraits of his client. In order to get around to this problem, or more like to escape from it, H. decided to produce another third portrait of S., but this time the image will be in words. Through some hidden impulse or instinct or whatever, H. decided to turn into writing (the "calligraphy" in the title).

I never expected this book to develop in the opening chapter a similar theme of another novel I finished last year, also from the Portuguese language. The Stream of Life by Clarice Lispector (tr. Elizabeth Lowe and Earl Fitz) is narrated by a female painter who writes of her innermost consciousness and feelings the way paint drips from her brush pallette, i.e., the way consciousness streams forth from a fountain of imagination. But where Lispector's prose issues forth quick as quicksilver, Saramago's brush paints from a slow easel, building from primary colors as he established his plot. But as in Lispector's "art book," plot is probably the least of Saramago's concern here. Manual is, from the outset, a novel of ideas: ideas about art, about the expressions and forms that art makes, and the relationships of these art forms.

Manual de Pintura e Caligrafia first came out in 1976, only the author's second published novel at that time. The first, the still untranslated The Land of Sin, appeared almost thirty years earlier. In between, he produced some collections of poetry and newspaper articles. The English translation of Manual appeared in hardcover from Carcanet Press in 1994, and in paperback from the same publisher a year later. Among his earliest works in the original Portuguese, this is the first "window" to his works as it remains to be the earliest with an English translation. But the translation has since gone out of print.

Last year The Collected Novels of José Saramago was released in e-book format, as an exclusive compendium of Saramago's fiction (twelve novels and one novella). This collection is missing Manual of Painting and Calligraphy. Why this book was not reprinted or included in the collected edition of his fiction is a mystery to me. Was it due to the quality of the translation? Saramago was known for being very exacting about translation of his books. There was an instance when the novelist requested for a more faithful English translation of Baltasar & Blimunda as the first published version contains editorial amendments that he wished to be overruled. What could be the reason for him to suppress this translation while he was still alive?

Maybe initial sales of Manual were poor so the publisher did not produce any more copies? But Saramago, Nobel laureate, is a big name now, almost a brand. His name recall alone will be enough to pull new readers and drive sales of this book, especially a book with such a lyrical title.

Perhaps Saramago consider this work to be minor, not at par with his later novels which are considered masterpieces? But the book has been released lately in other languages. So is it the English translation again? But Giovanni Pontiero is a multi-awarded translator and well-regarded even by Saramago.

Maybe there are some copyright issues with this book? Or maybe the supposedly overt political theme of the book is the reason? I doubt it. Saramago courted controversy like black ink stain on bright white paper.

Whatever the reason, the rarity of this novel makes it Saramago's priciest book.

Okay. Here's the bragging part.

I happen to own both the paperback and hardcover. A month or so before the Senhor died, the OOP book suddenly appeared online at a very cheap price. Through a friend, I was able to snag a copy of the hardback. The paperback I got from the book swapping site BookMooch, of all places.

Reader Alert: Open Library

I am still navigating Open Library but here is what is exciting:

• Over a million free e-books
• Books can be read or read-to (there is a nice audio integration) - Gutenberg + Librivox say
• Signing up is free; it gives you the ability to add or edit stuff
• You can create lists (woo hoo! though I wonder why I need another listing service for)
• A small but growing lending library

Signing up already? That's what I thought...

The Captive Mind

I started reading this book somewhere in April last year, then abandoned it due to travel schedules, and have been reading it amidst different books since last month. A long drawn read sometimes hampers a reading experience, but not when the book has been written with as much clarity as Czeslaw Milosz has accorded the Captive Mind.

Milosz, a Polish writer, lived through the Warsaw uprising of 1944 and the Russian rule in Poland, and initially lent his cooperation to the Communist government by becoming the Government's Literary attache to Paris. These were the initial times, when the Red Army was trying to win Intellectuals over by giving them some literary freedom, as long as they did not criticize Russia or its theories in their writing. Neutrality then, was acceptable. But soon, the noose tightened to swerve these intellectuals into praising the regime, and it was no longer possible to be a writer without contributing to the party's agenda. Milosz struggled with this acceptance for a while, until his ideas of literary freedom won and he seeked political asylum in Paris. Captive Mind was completed during this phase, even though the seed had begun during his years of cooperation.
This background is essential to a book in which Milosz explains his initial cooperation and the cooperation of several Polish intellectuals. He does this through a couple of concepts, followed by 4 biographies of such writers. The concepts are interesting. Take for example the pill of Murti Bing. In a fantasy written by Witkievicz, an Eastern Invader Murti Bing defeats Poland, and offers a pill of happiness to its exhausted people. People take it willingly, because everyone inherently wants to move to a harmonious state. Milosz likens the pill to Communism - which offers a harmonious existence to all men, dissolving divides. People exhausted from the Nazi rule willingly accept it.
What takes the center-stage in the book are the four biographies of Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta. All of these are Polish writers, and for different reasons are drawn to the idea of Communism. Alpha is drawn to purity and monumental tragedy, which a war-torn country gives him aplenty. Beta is a disappointed lover, a nihilist who has witnessed first hand the society that builds up in a concentration camp, and is a brutal narrator of it. The realism of Marxist regime appealed to his love for brutal truth, as did its materialism.
Gamma, a slave of history was a non-entity in the literary world before the war, but was elevated to a position of prominence & power with his embrace of the socialist regime.Lastly Delta, the troubadour was a jocose storyteller, who liked the regime because it paid him for his popular writing.
These portraits are tremendous, and each presents a different logic for embrace of a tyrannical regime. These writers, including Milosz are making some compromises, but considering the alternative - of not being able to write, or of exile to a nation where no can read your writing, their compromise does not warrant a harsh judgment. I would really like to know who these authors are that Milosz represents, and if possible read something from them - at least from Beta, whose writing seems a harsh portrayal of human nature under duress.
Milosz' language is a little poetic, he is not a debater and he sometimes digresses from the argument into memory lanes, which makes the book a little charming,and melancholy despite the ideological theme.
Once the portraits have ended, the book has become a bit monotonous. Perhaps Milosz should have ended sooner.
An interesting term in the book: Ketman. Act of paying lip service to the authority while holding personal opposition. Wonder why it has not come up in my earlier Totalitarian reads.

Don Q, via Cide Hamete

Do we live in the age of translation?

Cervantes, an early instance of greatness in the "history" of the novel, has a ready answer in Don Quixote. The novel is presented as a translation by a Spanish-speaking Moor, from the Arabic of a certain historian named Cide Hamete Benengeli, of the history of the knight errant Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza. While the unnamed narrator recounts this "translated" history, he constantly reminds us of this fact. At several junctures in the novel, the narrator interjects the (i) translator's and (ii) his own annotations of the Arab's version of the events. In Part II, for example, the narrator interrupts the story to say:

Cide Hamete, the chronicler of this great history, begins this chapter with the words: 'I swear as a Christian and as a Catholic ...'; to which the translator adds that when Cide Hamete swore as a Christian and a Catholic, being a Moor, as he most certainly was, he only meant to say that just as when the Christian and Catholic swears something he swears, or should swear, the truth, and he swears to tell the truth in everything he says, so Cide Hamete was also telling the truth, as if he were swearing as a Christian and a Catholic, in everything he wrote about Don Quixote ... [Part II, Chapter XXVII, tr. John Rutherford]

Ah, the truth! And then Cide Hamete (through the translator, via the narrator) goes on to discuss a seeming "inconsistency" of previous events in the first part of the history, specifically the theft of Sancho Panza's donkey by the convict Ginés de Pasamonte. The inconsistency arises presumably from the "printers' carelessness" that led to the omission of the incident in the publication of the first part of the history. This "has led many people to offer their opinions and blame the printing mistake on the author's poor memory."

It appears then Cervantes craftily introduces a mistake in this long and clumsy history, but its teller (Cide Hamete), its translator, and its narrator are there to set the record straight. The mistake acquires a new kind of significance as Ginés, now a puppeteer and master of a fortune-telling ape, becomes embroiled again in the glorious adventure of our knight errant and his squire.

To answer the question posed above, it may be best to quote again an interruption by our narrator regarding the integrity of the history, demonstrating as it is how the telling of Truth (with the capital t) in every History is ever so relative in every telling of it. At every remove, of the novelist from the story, of the translator from the source, of the teller from the tale, and of the reader from the page (not to mention the English translator's remove from the Spanish prose), the accumulation of subjective interpretations and authorial decisions is staggering.

It is said that in the original manuscript of this history one reads that when Cide Hamete came to write this chapter his translator did not render it as the Moor had written it, with some sort of complaint against himself for having undertaken such a dry and limited history as this one about Don Quixote, always feeling himself restricted to talking about him and Sancho, never daring to venture out into any digressions or more serious and entertaining episodes; and Cide Hamete added that to have his mind, his hand and his pen always constrained to writing about one subject and speaking through the mouths of so few characters was intolerable drudgery, which yielded nothing to the author's advantage, and that to avoid this problem he had in the first part had recourse to certain tales, like those of Inappropriate Curiosity and the Captive Captain, which stand, as it were, apart from the main story – although the other tales narrated there are events in which Don Quixote himself was involved and which could not be omitted. [Part II, Chapter XLIV]

And then the narrator went on to describe Cide Hamete's justifications for the apparent divergence of style between the first and second parts of the history. Both the translator and narrator of the Quixote seem to be acting as apologists for the historian, smoothing out the wrinkles in the narrative, and justifying the choices and style of its composition.


Note: I'm presently on page 792 of the book, which I'm reading intermittently since July as part of a group read. Obviously I was waylaid by other books and failed to stick to the schedule. I still have some 200 pages to cover.

Masque of Africa

I am not enjoying Naipaul's exploration of Africa and its beliefs as much as I have enjoyed some of his other works. I think I can blame it largely on expectation mismatch. I was expecting a look at some African traditional beliefs, their placement in some context, some pattern - and some perspective on what they mean to a people. Au contraire, Naipaul seems to be exploring those beliefs often in a touristy manner, which seems uncharacteristic of him.
He has so far traveled to Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana and is now in Ivory Coast. In Uganda, he goes to the Kasubi tombs, and explores the tradition of Kabaka - the kings of the Buganda, a kingdom/region within Uganda. The one thing that seemed catchy was the way Kabaka were buried:

The corpse of the king would have been dried over a slow fire for three months. Then the jawbone would have been detached and worked over with beads or cowries; this, together with the umbilical cord, also worked with beads, and the penis and testicles, in a pouch of animal skin, was what would have been buried here. The rest of the body, the unessential man, so to speak, would have been sent somewhere else.

In both Uganda and Nigeria, he meets lot of people who fleece him, and while meeting every godman, Naipaul seems to be constantly agonizing over how much money he would have to pay. His distrust and the agony is almost comic, but not quite. It appears like his experience is constantly colored with this agony, and almost always he seems to not want to carry out a plan he himself suggested. So if anything sounds worse than the touristy nature of his exploration, it is the reluctance of that tourism.
There is one story is Nigeria, not so much about beliefs, but related to social customs - the story of Laila and her daughter. Laila marries a Muslim king, against all advice, and finds herself having to live with her husband's other marriages and the 'mess of harem life'. She struggles to bring her daughter out of this life and marries her off to an old Arab doctor who lives in Dubai. In time, the doctor too brings a second wife home. It is a sad tale, and to imagine the frustration of this young woman is heart-breaking.
The Ghana section is almost too touristy, something that I hardly enjoyed. It was also a more political commentary than one on beliefs.
The section on Ivory Coast has begun with the legend of Houphouet who went through an elaborate ritual to gain power. Exotic.

John Banville - The Lemur

The Lemur (a book that can be breezed through in a couple of hours as I discovered yesterday) is a book by John Banville's alter ego Benjamin Black. Banville does not seem to mind blurbs that read 'John Banville writing as Benjamin Black.' In fact it seems like a hint to the reader, John Banville Lite production.

My earlier encounter with the Black version was Christine Falls (oh Quirke!) Both books must be called literary thrillers. There are no agonizing sentences (like in Banville) but some descriptions are so beautiful - a shadow seems like a blotch of watered ink (I can't find the page on the book so that I may quote the exact sentence. One good reason in favour of an ebook.)

John Glass, a former journalist, is recruited by the billionaire Bill Mulholand (also Glass's father-in-law) to write his biography. Glass hires a researcher whom he nicknames the Lemur to gather the 'truth' about his subject. Things start to go wrong when the Lemur is murdered.

Black twists every conventional clue on its head and ultimately whodunnit becomes far less important than the many whys that are subtly pointed to. The Black books are psychological thrillers in the sense that the primary murder takes a backseat to the protagonist's psychological journey through the process of uncovering the murderer.

Still, for thrill, I'd rather read watered ink shadows than ridiculous jumping off helicopters over Rome.

Kitne Pakistan (Partitions)

I am a little ashamed to be reading this book in translation when it has been originally written in Hindi, my native language. I just chanced upon the translation in a Delhi bookstore, and was instantly interested - mainly with the cover, but also with the idea. Given the scarcity of Hindi bookstores, I realized there were slim chances that I would find the original version soon, and decided to settle for the translation (surprisingly, a friend - a Hindi movie fan(!) has the Hindi version, which I some day hope to read)
Everyone born in India and familiar with Indian movies will likely know Kamleshwar - the scriptwriter of some legendary Hindi movies like Aandhi, Chhoti Si Baat, Burning Train, Mausam. But I has never read his written word, and Kitne Pakistan is becoming a wonderful introduction.
In Kitne Pakistan, Kamleshwar has dealt with the cruelty of Indian partition of 1947 in a very unique way. A writer who calls himself adeeb (a litterateur) , and his assistant Mahmood argue cases transcending geographies and times, questioning Gods, kings, autocrats and politicians on their atrocities against humanity. Their trial is against many partitions that have fractured people in the name of religion, justice and more.
The first trial (more like a polite yet accusing letter) concerns the defence minister and prime minister of Pakistan, who, with the aggression of Kargil have violated the promise of peace made in 1972. Soon follows the story of Indra and his violation of Ahilya, rishi Gautam's wife. Adeeb questions Rishi's treatment of his wife and the terrible curse he puts on her, the prime victim of this duplicity. This is the grave partition by the Brahmins - to separate womankind and treat them with different standards.
There is a rather interesting story of Gilgamesh and Sumerian deities, where the deities are shown to be as power-hungry as the human kings, and try to crush Gilgamesh the powerful human king. Centuries later, the land of Gilgamesh is under fire from NATO missiles, and adeeb accuses Kofi Annan, the UN head for his neglect. His summons for Annan are beautiful and reflect the despair of the neglected modern world.

In case he has forgotten, remind Mr. Annan that the world is witness to the conflicts that take place in the name of global economic enterprise and threaten to destroy common man in every country and culture. A dark chapter, based on blind faith has opened in history and leading to genocide. So long as these conflicts are perpetuated, dysfunctional communities will emerge, giving birth to an unjust and unprincipled world. Fish will continue to perish in Danube.

Interspersed with these trials are some love stories (so far I have only read two), which are themselves fractured or left affected by the partition, and depict, a bit sentimentally how partitions kill love, happiness, conversation.
On every page of this wonderful book, there is a new hypothesis, perhaps even new facts. I am currently in the middle of Mountbatten's confessions to Edwina on his role in the Indian partition, and though not shocking, its a bit startling to read this confession.

In a Strange Room

A week ago, on one of those impulses that make you buy shoes you don't need, I ordered Damon Galgut's In a Strange Room. Glassy-eyed, unable to tear yourself away from the window display of the shoes, hovering until you can resist no longer, I kept checking my email for the shipping information and then kept refreshing the webpage with the tracking details every hour to see if the book had landed in Chennai. Then there was the agony of waiting until it got to my doorstep. This is the point at which you have paid the bill for the shoes, the frenzy of impulse slowly replaced by the unease of post-impulse. Now the book should have been opened, flipped and delegated to one of the many to-read summits, stoking the same guilt as the unnecessary shoes. But what happened instead was I started reading it in earnest. For the next few days, whenever I found time to read, I picked up In a Strange Room instead of foraging among the other half-reads and squandering ten minutes on the dilemma of what would be good to read now.

In my imaginings of how memory could be narrated, I always envisioned fragments that the reader would pick up and connect. What Galgut does is quite brilliant. Instead of fragments what we get is a sequence of events with fabrications, forgotten bits all admitted to. But the best part is the switching of voices from third to first person and back to third. The first time I encountered the switch it was startling. A few times into them I was able to appreciate how well the first person conveys the sense of immediacy the narrator feels with certain moments in his memory of each journey. Isn't that how it is with memory. You try to recall something that happened and at some point you can feel the breeze on your face as if you were back again at that beach. I always feel that distinct awful aftertaste of vomit when I look at the cover of Richard Bach's Curious Lives (I refer to it as THAT ferrets book) because when I was gifted that book I was in my first trimester and had just thrown up lunch. Voice switch is not the only thing Galgut does. He plays around with tense as well. The overall effect is of zooming in and out of these journeys, rewinding, forwarding, upping the volume sometimes and pressing on mute occasionally.

As I was reading In a Strange Room I kept thinking of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland. I don't know why except that the latter was another 'memory' book.Their contrasts are vast and interesting but that is for another post. In all this talk about shoes and impulses I missed mentioning the flip-flops. So reasonable, so useful, so comfortable, so comforting. I also ordered Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. That arrived along with Galgut's. Since it was a book one heard about a lot and since Rilke was showing up everywhere in my readings, I sat with the Letters last night, read a couple, starred a few lines, set it aside and went back to reading Geoff Dyer's The Ongoing Moment. Dyer was focusing on the lonely overcoated man going nowhere and how he was such a recurring theme in photographs. As is habitual with Dyer jazz found a way into the discussion about snow and photographing from windows and Eugene Smith. In the late 1950s - early 1960s, Smith holed himself in a Manhattan building and set up six cameras near windows (he went on to rig microphones as well) and obsessively photographed the street below. On the floor above his apartment, a loft, some jazz musicians met regularly to jam. Smith started photographing their sessions. Except for a solitary shot of Smith's street, Dyer included no other photographs and I found myself thinking how I would have to look them up.

In the 2009 fall issue of the Paris Review, there is a wonderful collection of prose fragments of Rilke. I like to read those fragments every now and then. This morning, given the sampling of letters last night, it seemed fitting to pull out the magazine and read parts of Rilke's Interiors. After savouring a few paragraphs I casually turned a couple of pages and stared in wonder at Eugene Smith's photos of the Jazz Loft looking back at me.

Did I mention that Damon Galgut's In a Strange Room, consisting of three different journeys, originally appeared as three separate novellas in the Paris Review?